Poundstone started doing stand-up comedy at
open-mic nights in
Boston in 1979. In the early 1980s, she traveled across the United States by Greyhound bus, stopping in at open-mic nights at comedy clubs en route. She stayed in
San Francisco, where she became known for improvisational sets at
Holy City Zoo on Clement Street and
The Other Café comedy club in
Cole Valley. In 1984,
Robin Williams saw her act and encouraged her to move to
Los Angeles. She performed her act when Williams hosted an episode of
Saturday Night Live. That year, Poundstone was cast in the movie
Gremloids. She continued as a comedian and began appearing on several talk shows. In 1989, she won the
American Comedy Award for "Best Female Stand-Up Comic". In 1990, she wrote and starred in an
HBO special called
Cats, Cops and Stuff, for which she won a
CableACE Award, making her the first woman to win the ACE for best Standup Comedy Special. In March 2019, comedian
Tig Notaro named
Cats, Cops and Stuff one of The 5 Funniest Stand-Up Specials Ever for
TIME Magazine. Poundstone went on to another first with her second HBO stand-up special,
Paula Poundstone Goes to Harvard, taped on campus in
Sanders Theatre. Poundstone had her own
Bravo special in 2006 as part of their three-part
Funny Girls series, along with
Caroline Rhea and
Joan Rivers, titled
Paula Poundstone: Look What the Cat Dragged In. Poundstone worked as a political correspondent for
The Tonight Show during the
1992 US presidential campaign and did field pieces for ''
The Rosie O'Donnell Show in 1996. In 1993, Poundstone won a second CableACE Award for "Best Program Interviewer" for her HBO series The Paula Poundstone Show.
She was then featured in her own variety show, The Paula Poundstone Show,
on ABC (which lasted two episodes). She also appeared on Hollywood Squares and was a regular panelist for the remake of To Tell the Truth''. Poundstone had a recurring role in
Cybill Shepherd's TV series
Cybill (1997). In the mid-1990s, she was featured in a series of instructional, hybrid animation shorts that were called "Another Pointer from Paula Poundstone." These were used as
bumpers for
PTV Park, a PBS children's programming block that was the precursor to
PBS Kids. These were directed by Francesca Rizzo and animated by
Gene Mackles. Poundstone has also worked as a
voice actress. She voiced Judge Stone on
Science Court (also known as
Squigglevision), an
edutainment cartoon series done in the
Squigglevision style that aired on Saturday mornings, on
ABC Kids in 1997. Staying with the makers of
Science Court,
Tom Snyder Productions, she was the voice of the mom, Paula Small, in the cartoon series
Home Movies for the show's first five episodes, which aired on
UPN. Between the show's 1999 UPN cancellation and 2000 revival on
Cartoon Network, Poundstone chose to leave the show and was replaced by
Janine Ditullio. The show's character, Paula Small, was named after and loosely modeled on Poundstone. Poundstone is a frequent panelist on National Public Radio (NPR)'s weekly news quiz show, ''
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me. In 2017, she launched a new science/comedy interview program on NPR called Live from the Poundstone Institute
that released episodes weekly, then stopped suddenly, saying “the semester is over”. In July 2018, Poundstone began hosting the information-based comedy podcast Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone'' with
Adam Felber, who appears on every show. Poundstone tours the country extensively, performing stand-up comedy in theaters and performing arts centers. She is known for never doing the same act twice and spontaneously interacting with the crowd. Writes Nick Zaino III of the
Boston Globe, "Her crowd work has always been unusual—her natural disposition, curious and ever-perplexed, allows Poundstone to aggressively question audience members without ever seeming threatening. And no one does the callback better." She has released three comedy CDs:
I Heart Jokes: Paula Tells Them in Boston on
April Fools' Day 2013;
North by Northwest: Paula Poundstone Live! (her first double album) in June 2016; and
I Heart Jokes: Paula Tells Them in Maine in January 2009. Poundstone is No. 88 on
Comedy Central's 2004 list of the 100 greatest stand-ups of all time. In 2023, she performed at Comedy Day in
San Francisco alongside
Marga Gomez. == Personal life ==